The same photo with the constellations drawn on it and the bright stars
named. Hercules sits in the middle, the Big Dipper's handle at the right,
Draco winding between them. — Drag the handle. On the left, the phone photo with nothing drawn on it. On the right, the star chart made from it: the constellations drawn in and the brightest stars named.

An ordinary phone photo of the night sky: faint stars scattered on a
near-black background, nothing labelled. — Drag the handle. On the left, the phone photo with nothing drawn on it. On the right, the star chart made from it: the constellations drawn in and the brightest stars named.

What constellations are in this photo?

Hand over a night-sky photograph and you get back a star chart, with the brightest stars named and the constellations they belong to drawn in. It works out where the camera was pointing from the star pattern alone. No time, no place and no camera details needed.

How you know the answer is right

Every answer is scored against pure luck before anyone sees it.
417 of 794 stars in the photo above line up with the real sky: 30× more than coincidence could manage.
If that margin is ever thin, no chart goes out. You get no answer instead of a confident wrong one, which is the whole reason these are worth trusting.

How a star chart is made

Send an ordinary photo One you took on your phone. No telescope, no tracker, nothing edited. Send the original file where you can: screenshots and heavy compression can throw away the stars it needs.
The pattern gets recognised Stars sit in the same shapes for everyone on Earth, so the picture alone is enough to work out which piece of sky you caught.
You get it back, named The constellations drawn on, the bright stars labelled, and anything else worth pointing at marked where it sits.

Which stars and constellations get named

The constellations in the frame, and the bright stars by name.
The famous clusters, nebulae and galaxies: the handful you can see without a telescope, like the Pleiades or Andromeda.
Planets, when there is enough to check them against.
Not every star gets a label. Only the brightest do, or the picture would disappear under its own writing.

What a star chart leaves out

The Moon. It is left out on purpose, every time.
Planes, satellites and meteors. That streak across your picture is a different question, and this does not pretend to answer it.

Identify stars in the Beltari app

Beltari camera viewfinder aimed at the night sky, Orion's belt on the crosshair

Outside, the Beltari app can identify stars in the sky from one tap: aim the phone, tap once, and the bright stars, planets and constellations above you come back named. Put the phone down and the map of that sky stays on screen for as long as you want to poke at it.
A star chart starts from a photo instead, so it names a sky from any night and works on whatever device you already own. It is a separate tool from the app, and it is the one this page is about.

What happens to your email address

Stored: your email address, the time it was sent, and which page it came from.
Used for: one message, when star charts launch. Nothing else.
Kept until: the launch message goes out, and deleted once it has. If star charts have not launched by the end of 2027, everything is deleted then.
Stored by Cloudflare, in the European Union. It is not passed to a mailing-list company, and it is never sold.
Removal: write to [email protected] at any time, and the launch message carries a one-click removal link.
This form is not meant for children. An email address known to belong to a child is deleted.